A Case for One Million Atlantans
- Matt Guenther
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
A lot of what you want out of this city requires more of us in it.
It's become a common refrain around here anytime traffic is particularly bad or a new apartment building breaks ground: "we full."
It's a groan about the challenge of getting around in this city, and I can empathize with that. But... it's not true. Others have already broken this down, so I'll be brief.
We have a lower population density than Detroit, a city no one has ever described as too full.
Seattle and famously car-dependent Los Angeles have more than twice as many people per square mile as we do.
We are the least dense city with rapid transit heavy rail lines.
Of U.S. cities with more than 100k residents, Atlanta isn't even in the top 100 "fullest." Some places that are: Cleveland, Ohio and Pembroke Pines, Florida.
A million of us inside the same 135 square miles works out to about 7,400 people per square mile. Los Angeles is around 8,200. We added 8,350 people last year. Less than half as many as Charlotte and Fort Worth. Thousands fewer than Seattle, Houston, and San Antonio. That pace gets us to a million in the 2080s. Twice that pace gets us there in the 2050s.
Why should we want to grow? Why should we want to welcome as many new Atlantans as we can each year? Here are a few reasons:
More frequent MARTA service to more places? One million Atlantans.
Our city has a love/hate relationship with MARTA. It's like a beat-up car you have a special attachment to. You love it because it's yours, but it drives you crazy that it's always broken down or can't go anywhere you want to go. Maybe you even wish you had something better but you have no money for it. It's MARTA.
Our state lawmakers have spent decades demonstrating no serious interest in funding public transportation in the heart of our state's economic engine. So the agency runs on local sales taxes, supplemented by federal assistance and passenger fares.
WMATA, DC's system, was founded around the same time and serves a metro area we just passed to reclaim sixth-largest in the country. Their budget this year is $4.957 billion. MARTA's is $1.55 billion. WMATA doesn't have a dedicated state funding stream either, to be fair. What it has is Virginia, Maryland, and DC writing large checks anyway, year after year. Nobody is writing us that check.
Which leaves exactly one lever we control. Every new Atlantan funds MARTA whether they ever set foot on a train or not, because they buy things here. A million of us is a MARTA that can add service instead of reshuffling what it already has.
Keeping your child's school open? One million Atlantans.
In December the school board voted unanimously to shut down 16 schools or fold them into other buildings. APS has room for close to 70,000 students. It's nearly one-third empty and enrollment is expected to decline.
Why is enrollment falling even though the city itself isn't getting smaller? For one, fewer children are being born in Georgia, close to 29% fewer per capita than in 2007.
Fewer children per household means it takes more households to keep the same building open. As birthrates fall, a city that adds only 8,000 or so people a year city-wide is not going to refill these elementary schools.
People will keep fighting to save their local schools, but it's a numbers game. Between falling birth rates and families choosing private schools, this keeps happening until more families with children move here.
A walkable neighborhood? One million Atlantans.
Retailers choose locations by counting the households inside a store's potential catchment area, meaning the area it can expect to draw customers from. The rough numbers are about a thousand households needed for a corner store and six to eight thousand for a grocery store.
People in rural, suburban, and urban places have very different ideas about how far is too far to go for a store. A suburban grocery store still finds its six thousand households, it just pulls them from a few miles out and everyone drives. Rural shoppers may think nothing of driving fifty miles a week.
Right now, the city of Atlanta is home to many large tracts of suburban-level density but with residents hoping for urban-level walkability.
Atlanta has 236,468 households spread across 135 square miles. In a typical neighborhood that puts roughly 1,400 households inside the half mile most people will actually walk. Maybe a corner store (if the whole neighborhood shops there), and well short of a grocery store.
So there isn't one and people drive instead. It's why your neighborhood might have a Publix or Kroger five minutes away by car, but nothing much within walking distance.
The more specialized the business, the worse it gets. A bakery or a small music venue needs a much bigger pool than a corner store does, so rather than opening in neighborhoods they cluster in a few districts and everyone drives to them.
At a million residents, that same half-mile circle holds about 2,600 households instead of 1,400. That's how you get more places to walk to in your neighborhood. That's how you get more EAVs, more Summerhills, more Inman Parks and Grant Parks.
Objections to one million Atlantans
It's not that people saying "we full" don't have anything to complain about.
Traffic is a serious problem, and a denser Atlanta doesn't magically have empty streets. But consider where the people we don't take end up. Metro Atlanta added 64,400 residents last year. Most of them landed outside the city, in places twenty to forty miles out, and plenty of their cars end up on the same roads you use every morning and afternoon. The person who lives in the city is your neighbor. The person who lives in Lawrenceville is traffic.
Crumbling infrastructure is a problem too. There are 4,000 miles of water line under this city, a lot of it built a hundred years ago, and the repair bill will cost around $2 billion. But that bill doesn't shrink if we stop growing. A hundred-year-old pipe under a street with twenty houses on it costs the same to replace as one under a street with two hundred. We would just have more people to split the burden.
Many Atlantans say they wish MARTA went more places more often. We want our neighborhood schools to stay open and a corner store we can walk to. These things require more Atlantans. So the next time a crane goes up over what used to be a parking lot, I hope the thought isn't "we full." I hope it's "We're glad you're here!"
